Son[i]a #281
José Luis Barrios Lara
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Music and sound production commissioned to Mario de Vega. Editing by Dolores Acebal and André Chêdas.
José Luis Barrios Lara is a philosopher, art historian, curator, critic, professor, and author of numerous essays and books. In his work, Barrios reflects on the insurmountable aporias that arise in contemporary global capitalism, between the free market economy and democracy as a political and legal system. He traces the origins of these contradictions back to the perverse hidden alliances that have gone hand in hand with the advance of colonialism, modernity, and industrial economy since the fifteenth century. And that have now become a neo-slavery regime that unleashes the full force of its violence, exploitation and expropriation on migrant bodies. According to his analysis, this violence is deployed in the form of a cultural and cognitive neo-colonialism that despotically manages the forms of representation or non-representation of bodies.
In this podcast, José Luis Barrios Lara reflects on the founding myth of the West, modernity, and the invention of the other. He considers identity politics as a political tool and a means for the management of bodies in space, questions the effectiveness of the epistemologies of the South, and interprets the global migration crisis as a form of neo-slavery. A grim scenario in which, he says, certain intersections of art and politics still have the power to destabilise the semantic field of representation and make room for the subversive.
Hugo Esquinca
Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with José Luis Barrios Lara that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Cuauhtémoc Medina that we were unable to include the first time around.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina talks about post-colonialism and fetishisation tactics, about the status of museums in global networks, about the role of the market as disseminator, and about how to fight – and try to finally win – the battle for cultural complexity.
Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about SEMEFO
Interview with Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about the artistic collective SEMEFO, which burst onto the Mexican scene in the early nineties with a proposal that explored the notion and implications of death by manipulating the corpse and its transformations.